1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the communication of information over a network, and in particular, relates to the accessing and processing of legal documents via a network, such as the Internet.
2. Background Information
The legal profession is a profession that requires the review of voluminous amounts of documentation by attorneys. For example, during a document-intensive litigation process known as “discovery,” one party (e.g., a “requesting party”) frequently requests another party (e.g., a “responding party”) to produce documents. The requesting party attempts to build its case by reviewing the requested documents and trying to locate highly significant individual documents (sometimes referred to as “hot documents”) that contain text or other information of an incriminating nature.
Document review is an extremely laborious and time-intensive activity. Documents first need to be requested by the requesting party and then produced by the responding party. Litigation strategies dictate that the requesting party try to craft its discovery requests such that the responding party is obligated to produce documents falling within the scope of the requests. Frequently, especially in large litigation cases, discovery requests are drafted very broadly, resulting in the production of thousands of pages of documents, of which only a few pages may be responsive or relevant, if any at all.
The sheer volume of produced documents requires hundreds of hours of attorney and paralegal time to index (e.g., identify and sort each page by a numbering system that uses “Bates numbers”) and to review the documents. Frequently, due to the expense of photocopying, only a single set of copies of the produced documents is available to the requesting party, and copies are only made of hot documents when they are located. As such, document review is often characterized by logistic and storage problems, with a group of legal professionals reviewing the produced documents, page by page, in a single room where everyone in the group can have access to the documents. Whenever a hot document is located, that document is typically photocopied or marked (e.g., manually “highlighted” with a highlighter pen, tabbed with a marker, or otherwise identified using manual techniques), and then manually indexed or referenced for later identification and use.
Documents are often produced to the requesting party in random boxes or stacks of pages, and there is virtually no means for efficiently sorting through the stacks and identifying hot documents. That is, other than manually reading each page line by line, it is virtually impossible to sort, organize, or search through the stacks of pages based on criteria such as date, author, recipient, subject matter, etc. Simply stated, document review is a time-consuming and expensive manual process.
With the increased use of network communications in recent years, such as the use of email via the Internet or via a company's internal network, email and other electronic documents are gaining the attention of legal professionals as a rich source of discoverable information. Email is rapidly displacing traditional documents (e.g., letters, contracts, memos, faxes, etc.) as a primary communication medium for business and personal correspondence. Because individuals are more inclined to communicate informally via email, email often contains crucial evidence and is exchanged at a higher rate than traditional documents. Indeed, during the well-publicized case of United States v. Microsoft Corporation, Civil Action No. 98-1233 (TPJ) (D.D.C. Nov. 5, 1999), email correspondence reviewed during the course of discovery was significant in building the United States governments' case against Microsoft. Such cases are becoming more common, where hundreds of thousands of email messages may be involved during litigation.
Although cases such as these are often viewed as “high tech” cases because the subject matter of discovery (e.g., emails or other electronic documents) involves electronic media rather the information printed on paper, these cases are nevertheless constrained to traditional discovery methods. The electronic email documents are downloaded and printed on paper (e.g., “hardcopies”), and then reviewed using the same types of manual reviewing and indexing procedures as used for traditional paper-printed documents. That is, the process involves meticulously analyzing each hardcopy document for specific evidence; indexing/recording which documents have been read, which contain evidence, etc.; and collecting the necessary evidence to develop a legal strategy.
There is virtually no means to control the timing of the discovery critical documents. The pivotal evidence might be discovered at any point during the process of reviewing hardcopy emails, which leaves legal teams with an incomplete picture of the evidence upon which to base their strategy. As is common, the focus or strategy of the litigation may change repeatedly during discovery. Thus, previously reviewed documents that were initially dismissed as irrelevant may need to be repeatedly reviewed. Often, the relevancy of individual documents is difficult to ascertain unless viewed in context along with a large body of documents. Obviously, these problems are aggravated when using traditional manual methods for processing paper documents.
Printing email from its native electronic format into a hardcopy results in the destruction of useful characteristics of email, even if hardcopies are scanned into an imaging database. For example, attachments and nested documents become detached and disassociated from their corresponding email messages. Metadata (e.g., date/time stamps, author identification, attachment data, tracking IDs, headers, etc.) are lost when email is printed.
Conversation threads revealing the contextual relationships between messages are also lost. For example, a response to an email message asking whether or not someone intended to commit an illegal act might be a one-word message simply stating “yes.” This reply could be a pivotal in a lawsuit, but if it became disconnected from the email containing the question (as would happen if the email message were printed), the reply would be rendered utterly meaningless. This problem becomes worst if there are multiple cc's, replies, forwards associated with a voluminous number of hardcopy emails. The sheer volume of email hardcopies, coupled with the lack of threading (or other easily identifiable contextual mechanisms), can easily overwhelm readers who, despite their efforts and attention, are nevertheless apt to make mistakes or to miss critical information. Thousands of emails must be read per day, and the emails are often a bewildering combination of disconnected questions and answers, copies of the same message, and detached attachments.
Accordingly, there is a need to improve the manner in which legal documents are made available for review and processing by legal professionals.